For us Valletta will always be… Valletta, the way we have always known it, the way we love it.

Yet we never pause to consider certain strange characteristics it has.

It was left to a presentation held by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura recently to show how strange Valletta is when one considers the cultural milieu that gave birth to it.

The occasion was the inauguration of an exhibition Il Processo Formattivo della Citta de La Valletta, the result of a joint study conducted by the ICAR Department of the Politecnico di Bari, the University of Malta International Institute for Baroque Studies and the International Seminar on Urban Forum.

Introducing the main speaker, Professor Denis De Lucca from the University of Malta said that the concept of Valletta is directly derived from the ‘utopistic’ climate then pervading Italy and exemplified in, for instance, Leonardo and in the designs for Sforzinda by Filarete, for Ferrara by Biagio Rossetti, the famous treatise Forme di Rocche e Fortezze by Francesco di Giorgio Martini and the equally famous Terra del Sole by Baldassare Lanci d’Urbino, the great war city dreamt of by Cosimo de’ Medici between Florence and Forli.

It was just after he had drawn up plans for this city that Lanci was called to Malta by the Knights of St John to be one of the first experts to draft plans for the new city on Mount Sceberras. And there are some similarities too, Prof. de Lucca added, between the design for the Terra del Sole and some characteristics of Valletta, such as the extraordinary length of some of its streets.

As every schoolboy knows, Pope Pius V, Ghisleri, sent his architect Francesco Laparelli to draw up the plans for the ambitious city of the Knights. He was helped in his great undertaking by the great military and urban expert Gabrio Serbelloni, a hero of the battle of Lepanto.

Together they designed Valletta in the form of an orthogonal grid with 90 rectangular blocks.

One first explanation for this, continued Professor De Lucca, is geographical since Valletta is built on a promontory with one sole access and not in the centre of a plain like Palmanova in Friuli, which was designed by the Venetians with three principal access points.

Some mediaeval cities, such as Cuneo in Italy, and the famous Bastides in France also look like the map of Valletta. Two thousand years before, the great architect Hippodamus had drawn up a plan for the city of Miletus based on an orthogonal grid.

King Philip II of Spain adopted the Valletta approach for new Spanish cities in Sicily, such as Carlentini, and in the New World, where the Jesuit Fathers, great professors of 16th century mathematics, used a similar approach for their experimental cities called ‘reduziones’ in Paraguay, now protected by UNESCO just as Valletta is.

A second explanation why Valletta was built on an orthogonal grid plan can be linked to the fact that Valletta was built in a hurry due to fears of a new Turkish attack. This was a parameter that did not allow Laparelli to experiment with the use of space. It may also be that the presence in Malta of some war engineers such as Fratino and Ascanio from Cornia, both employed by the Spanish Viceroy in Sicily, Garcia de Toledo, himself too a formidable military engineer, hindered him somewhat.

The next speaker, Professor Giuseppe Strappa from the Politecnico di Bari, explained the above more fully.

Considering the baroque way of building cities, there are things in baroque town planning that one does not find in Valletta.

Any comparison with town planning done in the same period in Italy show that baroque left spaces for churches and palaces, spaces that simply do not exist in Valletta.

More, its two principal axis, Republic Street and St John Street do not enhance the position of the principal church that St John’s Co Cathedral, but rather St John’s is almost an afterthought, with its side windows overlooking the main axis of the city.

Besides, considering that Valletta was built as a defensive city, its position was all wrong as the high ground (near Castille) is in the wrong place because once conquered, it would be easy to overcome the rest of it. That may be why such big and formidable bastions were built on the landward side of the city.

It was here that the research conducted in Malta by the students of the Faculty of Architecture of the Politecnico di Bari comes into focus.

The research included the reconstruction of the ground floors of many of the city’s urban blocks. In turn, this was then related to the comparison between the residential areas and the monumental areas and the living tissue of the city.

For, as we all are inclined to do, we tend to focus on the life of a city in times of war. However, 90 per cent of Valletta’s history was not lived in times of war but in times of peace where people lived together, where countless generations of families grew up, lived and died.

Consider Steven Spielberg’s film Munich, Professor Strappa said various sites in Valletta and elsewhere in Malta stood in for sites in Rome, Athens, etc. For Valletta is a city which can very well be at home in any Mediterranean country. The stones of its buildings are part of the common heritage of the Mediterranean. The only difference being that Valletta is both a residential and a military city and is therefore less commercial than similar cities in Italy.

And the city of Valletta has a different relationship with the churches and palaces that cities in Europe, built in the baroque era, have.

The students also conducted special studies on the Auberge buildings.

Finally, the studies, based as they were on research and interpretation, suggest how some areas in Valletta can be ‘perfected’. They do this especially with the Mandragg area and the GWU building.

It is important that any plans for the future express continuity with the traditional city, as against the more popular temptation of introducing contemporary innovations in the old city due to a subjective and autonomous way of considering the role of architecture in the life of a city.

The prevailing culture in architecture is not Mediterranean at all, but derived from the tradition of Northern Europe.

Such studies like the one conducted by the Italian students show that the only way forward for cities like Valletta is not through

the introduction of elements coming from a vastly

different culture, nor through slavish imitation of the old but through preserving the living tissue of the city.

There is no Mediterranean culture as such, Professor Strappa concluded: peoples as vastly different as the Turks, the Arabs, the Goths, left their cultural stamp. The Mediterranean is where conflicts of cultures are perennial. Structures like the Greek temple and the mosque, symbols of a different culture, all fought against each other. The only living tissue common throughout the whole Mediterranean are the buildings, which is why Valletta is the perfect Mediterranean city.

After such a talk, I reflected how the living tissue of Valletta has been allowed to deteriorate through neglect, through overcrowding with cars but also through such building mistakes as the Law Courts (a Greek temple to replace a baroque Auberge) and City Gate (a fascist structure punching an obscene hole in the curtain of bastions) and how I am even now not so sure whether any possible interventions, from the whole Park & Ride scheme to the new City Gate project do respect this so very important continuity factor.